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The article discusses the foundational role of metaphor in human thought and language, drawing heavily from the book "Metaphors We Live By" by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. It argues that metaphors are not merely literary devices but are fundamental cognitive abilities that shape how humans understand and express abstract concepts, often deriving from basic sensory experiences like spatial orientation or containment. The source illustrates how conceptual metaphors are pervasive in everyday language, influencing fields from literature and mathematics to political discourse, and posits that without this ability to understand one concept in terms of another, human civilization and complex thought as we know it would not exist. Ultimately, the text presents metaphor as a core mechanism for abstract thinking, highlighting its connection to embodied cognition and its implications for artificial intelligence.
By Erick W
The article discusses the foundational role of metaphor in human thought and language, drawing heavily from the book "Metaphors We Live By" by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. It argues that metaphors are not merely literary devices but are fundamental cognitive abilities that shape how humans understand and express abstract concepts, often deriving from basic sensory experiences like spatial orientation or containment. The source illustrates how conceptual metaphors are pervasive in everyday language, influencing fields from literature and mathematics to political discourse, and posits that without this ability to understand one concept in terms of another, human civilization and complex thought as we know it would not exist. Ultimately, the text presents metaphor as a core mechanism for abstract thinking, highlighting its connection to embodied cognition and its implications for artificial intelligence.